Education and Knowledge

As the oldest of three siblings and two cousins I have been in close contact with quite a few babies in my lifetime. Also, I have a second cousin with an unknown mental disorder that makes her unable to speak among other daily duties and so she is completely dependent on other people. Although my cousin is far from a newborn, her abilities are pretty on par with those of a toddler and over the vacation I wondered so much about how much she knows that we don't know. There is so much unknown about what we know as babies or in this case, there is so much we don't know about brain damaged patients. It makes it seem impossible to know whether it really is nature or nurture that affects this capability of acquiring knowledge. There are, of course, theories that test this unknown, for example the concept of a Tabula Rasa, or blank slate. Historically a concept thought by Aristotle, this theory states that the mind is a completely blank slate at birth and that we know nothing until we learn. Although a somewhat valid idea, I personally have many questions that rebuttal this claim. For instance, how do we know how to breathe when we first come out of the womb? Or cry, or smile? How can he claim that we know absolutely nothing when that is impossible. Humans cannot live without knowledge, it is something that we acquire every second, no every millisecond of every day through the sensory information gathered by our fingers, lips, noses, etc. And so, in writing this I think that I have started to favor the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate. I believe that education strengthens knowledge and learning new things, not only at school but through our surroundings and the people that we know and see is very influential to who we are as people. It is very plausible that someone who has a Harvard level education can get a much better score on the SAT than someone who lives in the slums and has had no contact with institutional education. But what really is knowledge and how can we justify our society's claims that standard education equals success?

We grow up, well the ones who are privileged enough to do so, with educations that start as early as three years old and graduate high schools and ivy league colleges with these 8 by 10 pieces of paper that allow us to get jobs at prestigious business offices and high end hospitals. But theres also this, "What if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of someone who can't afford an education?". An amazing quote that I found over the vacation that really made me think what if. What if it isn't about nurture and some of the world's greatest minds are trapped into child slavery in sweatshops in China or dealing drugs in the favelas of Brazil. What if. And although I like to keep the hypotheticals to a minimum, with knowledge, the what if's are infinite. What if our education system is complete bull and we are just wasting 20 years of our lives learning useless information. What if no one had education, would we be outcasts for knowing a nation's history of why they celebrate July 4th or the devastating events of the Nazi invasion in World War II and the Holocaust? What if slum children were given the opportunity to study, would it change their lives for the better or not at all? What if standardized testing is not what we should be doing; what if we  should be testing kids on their ability to think, to gain knowledge and to learn no based on what they can memorize what they have been taught in the 12+ years of school they attended? And what if we could find out what is really going through the minds of kids whose parents believe that there is no hope; the kids that are dropped off at institutions because of their handicaps and will never live up to their full potentials because no one believes in them. What if the cure to cancer, AIDS, the next big thing,  the meaning of life for God sakes, what if a brilliant mind can't offer the world what he was meant to offer because he is trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty. No one believes in the girl with severe brain damage who has to wear a diaper at age 19 and grunts inappropriately in public places. No one believes in the young boy selling cocaine on the favela alleyways to save money for the accidental baby he now has to take care of.

Education is important and I believe that. I cannot tell you the amount of things that I have learned over the years, mostly because I have conveniently forgotten the names of the types of clouds, but also because there is so much that I have learned and I don't take that for granted. But I do believe this. I believe that babies are incredibly smart creatures because they are the most curious and they see things in a way that no one else can. They see the world as something unknown; they no nothing so they know nothing can hurt them. I believe that communication is also a huge bridge of knowledge that can oftentimes sever the pathway. We cannot communicate with babies and so we do not know what they are thinking, how they are thinking or if they are even thinking anything at all. I mean, can they even form thoughts without a language; do they have a language that we as articulate human beings don't know about?  As for mentally handicapped children and adults, first of all I believe in them. I have started learning in psychology about types of disorders that sever language centers in the brain and memory loss that can cause the inability to learn new things or tasks but, I ultimately believe that every soul has the capability to make thoughts, either conscious or unconscious. And in those thoughts, knowledge is created, destroyed and adapted. So maybe it is nature or nurture of a combination of both. But the great unknown is what makes knowledge so fascinating. We use our brains to study brains and gain knowledge by learning about knowledge. We could we completely wrong about so many things that we know, but knowledge is flexible. I mean, not too long ago we did think the Earth was flat.